The present invention is related to documentation and help systems. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a method and system for enhancing software documentation and help systems.
In the electronic design automation (EDA) industry, tools for designing integrated circuits and printed circuit boards are packaged and distributed in product suites or tool sets in what are known as software releases. For a complex software design project, designers may employ a combination of tools from several software releases installed on a computer network. These tools often use a documentation and help system to display the documentation for the tools. The documentation and help system may be standalone or integrated into the tool. The documentation may be split into several document or help sets or may be organized into one giant document set shared by all of the tools in the software release.
Earlier documentation and help systems display and search help sets for a single tool in a software release, a predetermined combination of tools within a release, or an entire release at a time. The help sets are statically used by a tool or shared between tools in a release. Earlier documentation and help systems are not designed to browse and search documentation for an arbitrary combination of tools which spans multiple software releases. Further, they do not allow concurrent access to documentation for such arbitrary combinations of tools. For example, a tool could not ask the help system to browse and search documentation for one arbitrary combination of tools and while another tool asks the same run-time instance of the help system to browse and search documentation for another combination of tools. This is desirable when the two tools are participating in different design projects (or design flows) but sharing the same help system.
Additionally, earlier documentation and help systems do not allow one run-time instance of a tool to browse and search documentation for one combination of tools and another concurrent run-time instance of the same tool to browse and search documentation for a different combination of tools. This is desirable when the same tool participates in different design projects, each with its own combination of tools. Moreover, when tools are used from multiple software releases, it is possible to invoke more than one instance of a documentation and help system.
Rather than viewing document sets separately and possibly starting multiple instances of a documentation and help system, as described above, users would prefer a documentation and help system that allows them to browse and search documents for only the tools being used in a design project. Since documents may be stored in various locations across a network, users would also prefer to be able to find documents without knowing where the documents are installed. In other words, the installed software releases, which contain tools and documents, should be transparent to the users. Additionally, users would prefer to eliminate the overhead of browsing and searching through large volumes of documents that are part of the software releases but do not apply to the tools in use. Further, users would prefer to use a single version and instance of a documentation and help system in a design project. Moreover, at any given time, a number of projects may be in progress, each project using a different combination of tools. Thus, users would like to have concurrent access to a different set of documents for each project even though each release has a static set of documents.
The present invention provides a method and system for enhancing software documentation and help systems. In one embodiment, a virtual library for a selected combination of tools is created. The virtual library is then linked to tools in the selected combination of tools. In another embodiment, a combination of tools is selected from one or more software releases. The software releases comprise a plurality of available tools. The selected combination of tools comprises less than all of the plurality of available tools. Each available tool is associated with one or more documents. Access to only those one or more documents associated with tools in the selected combination of tools is provided.
Further details of aspects, objects, and advantages of the invention are described below in the detailed description, drawings, and claims. Both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory, and are not intended to be limiting as to the scope of the invention.